Posted on 06/04/2003 2:31:34 AM PDT by JustPiper
"Can I give you a little kiss, mommy, and can you give me a blessing?''
Those are the last words Rosa Flores heard from her 4-year-old son Enrique Mendujano as she sent him off to a baby-sitter. Hours later, the boy was killed by a shotgun blast when a family argument flared out of control.
Flores, 26, wept as she testified Tuesday in the murder trial of Jesus Munoz Padilla.
On the day of the murder, April 9, 2002, Flores said she gave her son the kiss he asked for and told him, "God bless you, my son.''
Flores said she then sent him up the stairs from their basement apartment in the Back of the Yards neighborhood to the second-floor apartment where baby-sitters Ana and Jose De LaTorre lived. Flores said she went to work, expecting her son would be well taken care of.
The single mother said she wasn't surprised when her son wasn't home when she returned from her factory shift, knowing the baby-sitters were going to visit relatives and take the boy in tow.
"Ana told me she was going to her cousin's home and not to worry because they were family and everything would be all right,'' Flores said.
But when a police officer pounded on her door, she began to suspect something was wrong. Then, she saw the expression on Ana De LaTorre's face.
"Ana kept saying it was my fault, it was my fault, and I asked what was wrong with my child if she was like this?'' Flores said.
Prosecutors say Padilla had killed her son by firing a shotgun through a rear window at Padilla's home on the 2900 block of West 38th. The boy had unwittingly become a victim of a family squabble between Padilla and his brother over money.
Padilla, 34, had first tried to scald his brother with a pan of juice from a roasting goat before grabbing the shotgun and firing, prosecutors said. The boy was sitting three feet from the window.
Padilla's wife Olga testified she heard "a loud boom," then her husband ran up the stairs to their second-floor apartment, looking frightened. He handed her the shotgun and fled to Oklahoma, she said.
Padilla's lawyer Daniel Radakovich contends he should not be on trial for first-degree murder because he did not mean to kill the boy.
The trial is expected to wrap up on Thursday
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